Hi, > On 11 Jul 2017, at 03:15, Felix Meschberger <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Hi all > > Calls may at time help converge on some topics. And if you are used to the > traditional office environment, you might be used to having calls and > meetings. > > But keep in mind, that this is *not* the way, how traditional open source > project in general, and Apache projects in particular, work. Here we mostly > are in an asynchronous mode, even though this might take a bit longer to > converge and some more typing. > > Having said that, it’s great to see this momentum, but I am concerned with > the an outlook that going forward this project really operates in a > synchronous call- and Slack-oriented fashion which might indeed create a > two-class society of those able to participate in the synchronous activities > and those relying on asynchronous mode. > > Please keep that in mind as we move this project forward. > > Thanks and keep the great work coming ! > > Regards > Felix > > PS: And, of course, as you conclude the call/meeting, having a write up > published through CWiki and/or dev list is a must. Thanks.
The really nice thing about a good asynchronous mode is that you end up with a searchable history for each conversation, ideally where the start of each conversation can be easily found and contributed to. I'm a fan. I think that all the OSS projects I'm involved with use an asynchronous mechanism to reach & document decisions. It's not uncommon to see an issue created for a particular conversation that starts with "As discussed on IRC, I spoke with, X & Y as I think that Topic A should be explored. They pointed out that issues 1, 2, and 3 will need thinking about, but I feel that benefits A & B are worth it. Please see issues 10 which is vaguely related.". It's a lovely way of having a nicely isolated conversation where interested people can jump in and comment. I realise that Apache uses email for this, but personally I find email lists really hard to use as I don't associate email with long-running, discontiguous-in-time conversations as the email inboxes on my iPhone, iPad and Mac do not lend themselves to this. This is very much a demotivator for me personally as it's so much work to manage mailing list conversations via my inbox. I'm very unlike to ever reply to any conversation that hasn't had activity since the last time I cleared my inbox to zero. I realise that there's the mailing list archive page, but I couldn't work out how to reply to a thread there as I'm not an ASF committer and don't use Google. I'm not going to come back to my email client to reply to the thread I read on a website; I'll just let it slide. I don't have much of a point here really. Mainly I'm letting everyone know that I'm not very active here as I find it hard to be. I appreciate that the email list is long-term stable, but it is intimidating and can be a barrier for people who are used to web-based asynchronous systems such as issue trackers, PRs or forums. I assume every other Apache project has overcome this and am be interested to know how they persuade people to use email lists. Regards, Rob...
